In the aftermath of the fall of Roe, this volume offers readers the opportunity to reorient scholarship and understanding about abortion, recognizing what was already true before Roe was overturned and how losing the protections of Roe forced, enabled, and perhaps even facilitated a new era of abortion. Only by understanding the historical moment when Roe fell can we anticipate what might happen next in the ongoing social and political contention over reproductive autonomy and freedom.
 
 

A powerful resource for classrooms and individual readers alike, The Nursing Clio Reader invites reflection on how the past informs current debates, urging us to engage deeply with the history of reproductive justice in a time of unprecedented change.

On the Frontlines of Crisis by Jason Rodriquez is a powerful and deeply human account of the experiences of healthcare workers during one of the most harrowing periods in modern history—the COVID-19 pandemic. As hospitals around the globe became overwhelmed by the influx of critically ill patients, those working in intensive care units (ICUs) were thrust into an unprecedented battle against a new, deadly virus about which little was understood. Rodriquez takes readers into the heart of two Massachusetts ICUs to learn about the people who put their lives on the line and faced unimaginable challenges as they treated critically ill patients at the peak of the pandemic.
 

Syphilis, AIDS, and COVID disprove any belief that scientific discoveries have ended the period of acute epidemic diseases that once defined 19th century life and replaced them with chronic cardiovascular diseases and cancers. Today, we cope with a greater array of epidemics than those who lived during the 19th century, even though we have the biomedical means to control them. Our cumulative experience with epidemic diseases, together with our attempts to eliminate them, remains a continued component of our existence.

The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the 19th and 20th centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the 20th century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the 21st century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.

Four out of the ten largest U.S. health care systems follow the policies of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that forbid abortion, sterilization, and related treatments in their hospitals. Drawing on rich interviews with patients and providers, Bishops and Bodies shows how these opaque restrictions conflict with medical standards, producing unjust and unequal reproductive care.

Mammography is a routine health screening performed 40 million times each year in the United States, yet it remains one of the most deeply contested topics in medicine. In Mammography Wars, sociologist Asia Friedman uses the sociology of attention to map the cognitive structure of the “mammography wars.”
 

Dying Green considers the environmental costs of common healthcare practices, raising an urgent question: in striving to improve the health outcomes of individual patients, are we damaging human health on a global scale? Offering a comparative analysis of the care provided to terminally ill patients in different settings, it envisions a more sustainable approach to healthcare. 

This anthology brings together the voices of abortion providers, counselors, clinic owners, neonatologists, bioethicists, and historians. Authors address the motivations that lead them to offer abortion care, discuss how anti-abortion regulations have made it increasingly difficult to offer feminist-inspired services, and ponder the ethical frameworks supporting abortion care and fetal research. 

Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data collected over a four-year period, Cherry’s study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion, and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses, but their place in the new American story.